The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds by Michael Lewis

Michael Lewis, the bestselling author of Liar's Poker, The Big Short, Moneyball, The Blind Side, and many other books, recently published The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds.

The book follows the lives of two Israeli psychologists and longtime friends, Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, and their groundbreaking work in cognitive science. They are widely regarded as among the most influential psychologists in history, and their influential theories have had a profound impact on our understanding of the relationship between humans and decision-making.

Kahneman and Tversky first met in the summer of 1960 at a meeting of the Israeli Psychological Association. The two quickly hit it off and soon discovered that their interests mostly lie within the field of Cognitive Science. From the start, they shared a passion for using psychological science to understand real-world decision-making. The two became fast friends, and their collaboration—dubbed “The Undoing Project”—would eventually lead to some of the most influential psychological insights of all time.

The pair came up with a number of groundbreaking theories about decision-making and biases in the way humans process information. Through their work, they developed theories that view humans as subject to inherent biases that may lead us to make irrational decisions. One of their most well-known theories, called prospect theory, deals with the relationship between people’s perceived risks and rewards. It suggests that when making decisions, individuals tend to focus more on their potential rewards than they do on their potential losses. They also developed a theory of cognitive dissonance which explains how our judgement and decision-making can be influenced by the information we receive, such as when we are presented with contradictory information.

This work revolutionized our understanding of human behaviour, and has had direct implications on how we think about decision-making in a wide range of fields, such as finance, marketing, military strategy and politics.

Kahneman and Tversky's collaboration was short-lived, as Tversky tragically passed away from cancer in 1996, but their contribution to Cognitive Science will be remembered forever. The Undoing Project is the story of their astonishing friendship and the groundbreaking research it produced. It paints an extraordinary portrait of the world’s greatest friendship and its consequences for our understanding of human behaviour. Michael Lewis' exciting tale is a must-read for anyone interested in the nature of human decision-making.